The Kurdish Regional Government says its peshmerga fighters came under attack from an Islamic State (formerly ISIS) suicide bomber driving a truck filled with toxic chlorine gas, in the latest chemical weapons accusation against the jihadist group.

“The fact ISIS relies on such tactics demonstrates it has
lost the initiative and is resorting to desperate measures,”
the Kurdish authority declared in a statement.

While footage of the attack emerged only recently, the attack
took place on January 23, when Kurdish fighters tried to
reinforce their positions on a highway between Mosul and the
Syrian border. The Kurds have been in an all-out war against the
Islamic State since last year.

The video provided by Kurdish authorities shows an attacker
driving a truck at full speed into the Kurdish positions, as he
comes under heavy fire. Authorities say their forces destroyed
the truck with a rocket before it had a chance to detonate near
soldiers. But the fighters then began experiencing “nausea,
vomiting, dizziness and weakness” – all common symptoms of
chlorine poisoning – and soon found “20 empty canisters”
in the back of the vehicle.

The Kurds said they sent the remains of the suicide bomber to a
laboratory, which said “the samples contained levels of
chlorine that suggested the substance was used in weaponized
form.”

Chlorine, a widely available household and industrial substance,
was most famously used in warfare during World War I, and is on
the banned list of chemicals under the 1997 Chemical Weapons
Convention.

But the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons
(OPCW), the chemical weapons watchdog, says it is not aware of
the incident.

“We have not had a request from Iraq to investigate claims of
use of chemical weapons in Iraq, and the OPCW cannot immediately
verify the claims,” it said in a statement.

The OPCW conducted a fact-finding mission in neighboring Syria
last year, where ISIS is also a major force fighting against the
government of Bashar Assad. Afterwards, it concluded that
chlorine was used “systematically and repeatedly” in
that conflict.

There were also allegations of ISIS chlorine attacks in Iraq,
made by government officials last September, and Kurdish
authorities say they have seen “plumes of orange smoke”
during recent battles in Tikrit.

The US says it killed the jihadists’ main chemical weapon maker,
Abu Malik, on January 24, also near Mosul. Meanwhile, OPCW
officials told Reuters that the Islamic State unsuccessfully
attempted to recruit chemical experts in the large city after
conquering it last year.

ISIS's plans to establish a caliphate stretching through the
Middle East appear to have been reversed, partly due to
better-organized resistance from the Kurds and the Iraqi army,
and also due to airstrikes unleashed by the US and its allies.
The Pentagon says it has killed 8,000 ISIS fighters in 2,800
strikes since September last year.